I’m going to interrupt my Japan coverage to mention that one of the things in the stack of mail awaiting us at home was the latest issue of Computer Music magazine. In it is an article about pitch shifting, starting with the old Harmonizers and going through the current crop of intelligent harmony-effects plug-ins. There is some nice coverage of Audio Damage’s Discord, which is appropriate since Discord is the best (and pretty much only) plug-in for creating Harmonizer-like effects. The original version of Discord was a near clone of the H910 Harmonizer; the current version includes the same stuff as the first but has a lot of other nifty features as well. The article nicely describes how Discord can be used to reproduce some of the most famous examples of Harmonizer-based timbres, such as Prince’s snare sound and the guitar solo in Yes’s “Owner of a Lonely Heart”.
Month: April 2007
We’re Home
We are, at long last, safely home. The alarm clock woke us up in Kyoto almost exactly 27 hours ago as I write this. I don’t think either of us has slept more than a couple of hours since. Our already-long layover in San Francisco ended up being about eight hours because our flight was delayed–maybe because of weather, maybe because of equipment problems, maybe because of the flight crews being disgruntled with the CEO’s compensation and causing disruption in retaliation, depending upon which rumor you listened to.
Heading Home
We’re about to check out and head home. This will be my last post from Japan but (as previously mentioned) not the last post about Japan.
It’s been a good trip. Yes, it’s a major drag that Tracie is ill and that we have to cut the trip short. However, we did see some beautiful and amazing things and when we ran down our unofficial list of things we wanted to do/see/experience/accomplish here we actually managed to hit most of them. We also know what we want to do when we come back.
Nara
Today we spent the day in Nara, Japan’s oldest capital city. Nara is home to a huge Buddha statue (even larger than the one we saw in Kamakura) housed in the world’s largest and oldest wooden structure. (I wonder about the “largest” assertion, though; I thought that the old blimp hangars in Oregon were the largest wooden structures.) It’s also home to about 1000 sacred deer which roam freely in the park and are completely nonchalant about the presence of humans. I have to finish packing so I’m going to post the following photos without further comment. We leave for the long journey home tomorrow morning.
Tour of Kyoto
First, a sitrep: we had hoped to fly home on Monday the 9th, but United was unable to accomodate this change. We’re now flying home on the 11th. Tracie’s condition seems to be stable for the moment. The silver lining to our cloudy situation is that we’re able to salvage some of our original plans for our stay in Kyoto. Today we saw several of Kyoto’s major attractions with the guidance and assistance of a private guide who goes by the nickname Sid. (His real name is Makino but I am not sure whether or not that is his family name.) It was a long day and I’m fairly tired so I’m going to let photos do most of the talking. I shot about 300 photographs today.
Kyoto Station
It’s been a long day and I’m somewhat tired, so this may be a somewhat abbreviated entry. We’ll see how much I can type before I have to call it a day.
We left the hotel in Kanazawa this morning –gee, come to think of it, I haven’t said anything about getting to Kanazawa in the first place, have I? Well, that shows you what kind of time we’ve been having recently. I’m going to set that story aside for the moment.
Okay, we left the hotel in Kanazawa and caught a train to Kyoto. I amused myself before the train departed by making recordings of the PA system and the trains in the station. During the ride I took a fair amount of video of the buildings and landscape passing by, and Tracie focused (successfully) on not throwing up her antibiotics.
In Kyoto
We are in our hotel at Kyoto, which adds new dimensions to the word “posh”. Sadly our stay here will be much shorter than planned. The room does have a nice, fast Ethernet connection (and a multi-purpose scanner/fax/printer, and a remarkably stocked mini-bar, and complimentary Hennesy and other stuff we can’t drink, etc. etc.) so I will probably post more photos later on.
Signing Off for Now
This will be my last posting here until we’re back home. I have a bunch more photos to post but I don’t expect to post the from here, given the circumstances and the necessity of making a long-distance phone call just to get a slow dial-up connection. Check back in a few days. Thanks for reading.
I forgot to mention
Special note to those of you who are directly affected by our change in plans (Hi Judy and Lisa): we’ll provide details when we have them.
In Kanazawa
We have arrived in Kanazawa. I’m gonna be brief because I have to make a long-distance call just to get a modem connection, and a slow one at that.
We’re bailing out. Tracie is getting worse and the backup antibiotics she brought “for emergency use only” aren’t agreeing with her. Current plan is to head to Kyoto tomorrow AM (as previously planned) and catch a flight the next day. This is assuming that we can get United to change the ticket. I’m having to get on the web just to find out what United’s phone number is because the local numbers are now closed and the only thing printed on our reservations is 1-800-UNITED-1 which is of no freakin’ use in a country that doesn’t print English letters on its telephone keypads. (Yes, how stupid is that of United? Don’t get me started.)